


No Rest for the Weary

by luoup (ravenic)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Technology, Burnout - Freeform, Gen, Overworking, lots of made-up words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 23:06:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16842277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenic/pseuds/luoup
Summary: The Castle of Lions is very, very old, and there are only three people who are trying to keep it going.  The house of cards is bound to crumble eventually - either the castle itself, or the people in it.





	No Rest for the Weary

**Author's Note:**

> long story short: i spent basically all of voltron wondering how in the world the castle could sustain itself. no matter how advanced and automated the technology, it's pretty old. so here's an idea basing off of that. 
> 
> this is kind of useless now, seeing as how the entire castle got squashed into a tiny crystal (still breaks my heart). but i thought of this a million years ago, so here it is anyway. i am so damn tired.

Lance was hungry _._ Problem was, he hadn’t seen Hunk since that morning, he didn’t really know how to use the space kitchen without setting something on fire (on _space fire_ ), and although he was hungry he wasn’t quite hungry enough to ask Coran. 

Come to think of it, Lance hadn’t seen Coran today either. 

When one was looking for Hunk, a good place to check was the hangars. The kitchen was Hunk-Finding Place Number One, but obviously he hadn’t been there because Lance was still hungry. Hangars were Hunk-Finding Place Number Two, so he went there. 

In Yellow’s hangar, Lance found Hunk. He also found Coran. Fortunately, the presence of Hunk meant that Lance wouldn’t have to resort to Coran’s cooking. He loved the man, but aliens must have different taste buds than humans because Coran’s food was definitely actually inedible for the human species. 

The two were deep in some kind of technical issue when he arrived. Coran was staring at a computer screen and was constantly glancing between it, a tablet he was holding in one hand, and Hunk, who was standing near an open duct vent in the wall. Hunk had a tiny wrist-screen held up in front of his nose. He stared at it intently, taking in Coran’s sporadic instructions and issuing directions into the open vent. 

They were concentrating so hard on whatever they were doing that neither noticed Lance enter the hangar. “Hi guys,” the Blue Paladin said, feeling a little guilty when they both jumped. 

Hunk’s face somehow lit up and dropped at the same time. “Lance! Oh man what time is it, I know I said I’d make lunch but we’re in the middle of –”

 _“Hunk!”_ came an irritable voice from somewhere in the vent. _“What next? I’m not interested in sitting here holding this juxtapositor forever!”_

“Heck,” Hunk mumbled, glancing back down at the wrist screen. “Uh, hang on, Pidge. I think that’s the section that needs the wraxes tightened. Keep the juxtapositor, that’s for later.”

 _“You sent me in here with a delicate piece of equipment and left it for last?!”_ the squawk reverberated weirdly on its way down the duct. Hunk gave Lance a guilty shrug. 

“Sorry, man,” he said, “we gotta finish this. We can’t really stop in the middle, and if we don’t get this section fixed up the Red-side wing of the castle might kind of explode relatively soon. And I can’t just take a break,” he gestured vaguely at the open duct, “you know, since Pidge is somewhere in there and might get lost if I don’t direct her.”

 _“I heard that,”_ came Pidge’s irritated voice from the wall, and both Hunk and Lance winced. Cranky Pidge was a bad deal, in any situation. 

Lance sighed. He was super hungry, but Hunk had more things to do than make Lance space lunch whenever he wanted. And yeah, sometimes Hunk exaggerated things, but there was a tension in his shoulders and a furrow in Coran’s brow that suggested that the whole “exploding castle” thing was maybe not as much of an exaggeration as one would hope. “It’s cool, man,” he said, putting on a smile. “I can handle making a sandwich for a meal or two. Have fun with your… Pidge-steering. I’ll see ya later!” 

Lance took off before he could find out if Pidge had heard that last comment. 

Time for some space sandwiches. 

*

Okay, now this was a little weird. 

After a long day working mechanics Hunk could almost always be found cooking, for relaxation if not for a proper meal. But it was definitely dinnertime, and Lance was standing in the kitchen which was empty except for an equally-confused-looking Keith. 

“Do you know where Hunk is?” the Red Paladin asked. “We’re out of leftovers and I thought he’d have started dinner by now.”

Lance was about to answer with a similar lack of knowledge when Shiro stuck his head in the door. “Have either of you seen Pidge or Hunk? My arm is making weird noises, I think it needs cleaning again.”

At the same time, Allura came in another door. “What is going on? Have any of you seen Coran? I haven’t been able to find him all day.”

 _There’s no way they’re still in the hangar._

But where else would they all be? _Jeez. Maybe they are._

“I saw them earlier,” Lance said as he headed back towards the hangar. “It was way earlier, like before lunch, but I guess it’s a place to start if all three of them are still missing.” He explained what the Yellow and Green Paladins and the castle mechanic had been up to earlier that day. None of the group understood what they had been working on, not even Allura who had grown up in the castle. 

“I never paid much attention to the mechanics of it all,” she said sheepishly as they walked. “Never needed to, I suppose. There were always so many people working on everything. I don’t even know what a juxtapositor _is_.”

The hangars were empty. But they heard a distant click and a crash and some very loud cursing in a variety of languages, and followed that down a hallway to a storage room and the missing trio. 

Whatever they were working on looked like a robot had been skinned and then blown up, and Lance had no idea what it was or what it was supposed to do. Coran was holding some tools and most of a large broken piece of glass while Hunk stared at whatever they had just tried to do, hands still up as if they could reassemble the piece by sheer force of will. Pidge, perched on a massive block of something that hummed like a beehive and glowed pale blue through the strips in its casing, was tapping furiously on a computer, glancing back and forth between three other datapads scattered around her and periodically pressing her ear against one shoulder to readjust the one-on-one-off headphones balanced on her head. She was apparently the source of most of the cursing, although Coran looked like he had probably just stopped himself when the group arrived. Hunk just seemed to be in shock. 

“Hello, Princess, Numbers One, Three, Four,” Coran said with a strained smile. “Is there anything you need? This is delicate work, you know, and –”

“If you aren’t here with a new glass sheet or about twelve new lanainen plugs, get out,” Pidge snapped, not looking up from her screens. 

“Uh,” Lance said, “we–”

“Aren’t you guys hungry?” Keith demanded. “Lance said you were working during lunch too. You should take a break.”

Hunk looked a little miserable, and Lance wondered if they had stopped at all the whole day. “We had something,” he said. “Kinda lost track of time, honestly. It’s not like we can finish now, though…” he glanced down at the shards of glass sparkling across the floor. “I don’t even know where we can get another of those with the right specifications. Maybe back at the space mall…” he trailed off with a longing sigh. “I can come make dinner now, I guess.”

“We can’t finish the reduxor now that the glass is broken, but I’m getting this thing done now,” Pidge muttered. “If I stop I will never find the bug, and then the hallway lights will never work again and I’m not into that. I’ll meet up with you later.” She waved them off with a distracted finger-wiggle without ever glancing up. 

Coran sighed. “I really ought to get started on the fansnurs in the lower corridor. They’ve been acting up for a while and I’m beginning to fear that they are but a symptom of a bigger problem. I’ll start the diagnostics now and maybe they’ll come up with something soon. We can’t have the zeeksors malfunctioning while we’re in dead space, after all.” With that incomprehensible statement he wandered off, leaving the non-technicians staring after him in bafflement. 

Hunk gave a defeated shrug. “Sorry we forgot again. There’s a lot to do. Like a _lot._ It’s a rabbit hole of repairs and I think I have a headache. Gimme a few minutes and I can get something set up for dinner, but one of you might have to deliver it to Coran and Pidge because I have never been this tired in my life.”

They followed him back to the kitchen in silence. Lance felt a twisty kind of guilt in his chest, and from the faces of the others they were maybe feeling the same thing. Hunk had been working hard all day and now he had to make dinner, because the rest of them were too incompetent to do it themselves. 

Lance compensated by sticking close to Hunk, telling jokes and giving gentle contact, support both physical and mental. Not one of them complained when Hunk fell asleep at the table halfway through making dinner. The others managed to finish it without setting off the smoke alarm, and Shiro carried Hunk to his bed while Lance and Allura cleaned the kitchen and Keith took food to Pidge and Coran. 

After getting Hunk actually into his bed – which had been a near thing, the Yellow Paladin had been literally falling asleep on his feet – Shiro returned to the kitchen to help clean. He was scrubbing the alien stovetop while Lance washed dishes and Allura dried when Keith came back. 

His brother looked a little shell-shocked. “Dude, what happened to you?” Lance asked, passing Allura the big yellow lionhead-shaped mug Hunk liked to use for his space coffee. 

“Stay away from Pidge unless you want to get your skin peeled from your body with words,” Keith said faintly as he went to wipe the table. 

“Oh dear,” frowned Allura. 

“I’ve almost never seen her this angry,” Keith said. “I think something’s wrong in the code and it’s pissing her off, but she’s probably too tired to be able to find it easily. I just left the food and hightailed it out of there.”

“Hey, you _do_ have a sense of self-preservation!” Lance exclaimed. “Not firefights, not open space, not the ten-thousand-year-old evil Emperor of the universe, but a five-foot-tall angry engineer is what makes you run for your life.”

“As if you’d have done any different,” Keith snapped. 

Lance shook his head. “Oh, absolutely not. Pidge was a terror at the Garrison, I learned my lesson after the third time I tried to bother her when she was working.”

“The _third_ time,” Keith muttered, but Allura spoke before Lance could fire back. 

“To be honest, I’m a bit concerned for them,” she said, frowning at the bowl she was drying. “The mice told me how much they’ve been working, and it isn’t really healthy. Especially with all the other work of Voltron, I am concerned that they are going to crash soon, or make themselves sick.”

“We’ll keep an eye on them,” Shiro said. He was worried too. “Try to get them to take breaks or something, or at least bring them food. We can’t have two-fifths of Voltron and our main backup going down.”

He didn’t doubt that they were doing important work. What he did doubt was whether they would remember to rest before they broke down like the castle was threatening to. 

*

The next few days were nonstop for all of Team Voltron. Multiple missions each day, both raids and diplomacy, sent everyone to the far reaches of galaxies and back, wormholing in and out for one task after another. Two small prison ships, three hopefully-soon-to-be Alliance planets, and a handful of Empire cargo ship inventory “repurposing” later, everyone was exhausted. 

Tomorrow didn’t have too much scheduled, mostly monitoring, sending transmissions, and processing data, so they all turned in as early as possible. Hunk almost fell asleep in Keith’s bed by mistake, and Pidge didn’t even bother to bring her computer back to her room with her. 

All was quiet in the Castle of Lions. 

Until Castle Standard Time 03:17, when an alarm began to blare.

Everyone was halfway out of their rooms, armor partially on or not at all, sleep-ragged and disheveled, when Coran’s voice came crackling over the speakers. “Sorry, sorry! False alarm! Just a minor malfunction, go back to sleep, everyone. Well…” static blurred through the connection for a moment. “Erm. Except Pidge and Hunk, could you please report to Control Room Four? I could use a bit of help. It’s only… somewhat urgent. Yes. Anyway, I’ll be here!” The radios cut off with a snap. 

The others had immediately gone back in their rooms to crash down on their beds, but they all woke up for a moment at that. 

_Well,_ that’s _not ominous at all,_ Lance thought morosely, staring at his ceiling as he listened to the _thunk_ outside that meant Hunk was smushing his forehead into the wall. 

_That can’t be good._ Keith almost followed, wanting to offer another pair of hands even if he knew nothing about maintaining an alien castle. But the last raid had nearly sent him into a healing pod and he was so tired he could barely see. Tonight he was sure to only get in the way. 

_Poor Hunk and Pidge,_ Shiro thought. He knew Hunk had gotten pretty banged up in his Lion during the last two missions, and Pidge almost certainly hadn’t slept more than six hours in the last few days, at best – all-nighters and short nights combined. He hoped that whatever was wrong got fixed quickly so the others could sleep too. 

_Where even_ is _Control Room Four?_ Allura wondered as she helped the mice get rearranged in her hair to sleep again. She was realizing just how little she understood of the workings of her own castle. If the misfortunes of the only three technicians said anything about it, the workings were very old and very delicate, and they were failing more and more. And she could do almost nothing about it. 

Hunk’s footsteps were slow and heavy as he followed Pidge away. She was more than audible, swearing loudly as she stormed off to wherever Control Room Four was. Her words could have turned a sailor blue. 

This was going to be a long night for Team Left. 

* * *

That was the breaking point. The next morning when the others woke, Coran, Pidge, and Hunk were still up. The entire kitchen table was covered with mechanical pieces of… something, and Hunk was alternating between examining some kind of blueprints on a datapad and putting the pieces together slowly, frequently picking up a piece and staring at it blankly before putting it back down and doing the same thing with another. Pidge was sitting on the floor instead of her usual spot on top of the counter, staring with an unfocused gaze at her computer through smudged glasses and tapping sluggishly on a pad. Coran sat at the counter fiddling with something made of magenta metal that looked vaguely electronical. 

“Have you guys been up all night?” Lance blurted out as the rest of Team Voltron entered the kitchen. At Hunk’s weak nod, he threw his hands up in the air. “That’s not healthy, man. You guys have to sleep! You’re gonna fall apart otherwise – if you’re not already.”

“We can’t sleep,” Pidge snapped. She would have been angrier at the scolding if she could have mustered enough energy. But she couldn’t, and so she had to just settle for a half-hearted glare. “If we sleep now, we will probably literally all die. Hunk has to fix the air cycle purifier machine in D12 corridor before it breaks completely and the whole section fills up with carbon dioxide and other things Humans can’t breathe. If I don’t finish fixing this code, half the hangar doors probably either won’t open, or they’ll open when we don’t want them to and kill us all because dead empty vacuum of space. And if Coran doesn’t…” she trailed off, blinking at Coran. “I actually have no idea what Coran is doing.”

“Flarg fluxitator,” the Altean answered, not looking up from where he was poking at the electronic thing with a tiny brush on a long thin handle, his face leaning so close that his moustache was in danger of getting ensnared in the little wires. 

Pidge nodded. “Flarg fluxitator,” she repeated as if that answered everything. 

Then she nodded some more. “I have no idea what that means,” she then said, blinking blankly back at the others. “But if we don’t do all this and then like six other things within about twenty-four vargas, we will probably all die, either by a crashing life support system, or a fiery explosion when something in this ancient decrepit castle finally gives in and just explodes. So, yeah. No sleeping for us.”

“Yippee,” Hunk groaned, putting down two pieces of the machinery back on the table and rubbing at his eyes with one hand. “I think my brain is made of sand now.”

“Mine is food goo,” Pidge agreed. 

“I believe someone may have replaced my eyes with arctic squeargle eyes,” Coran chimed in, cursing as his little brush got stuck in a metal snag. 

“But arctic squeargles don’t _have_ eyes,” Allura said in a helplessly confused tone, staring at her uncle. 

“My point exactly, dear Allura.” Coran sighed. “Number Five is right, though. These tasks can’t wait. Neither could the others, and the list is… still rather long, unfortunately.”

They were all shocked to realize how serious things really were. “I didn’t …” Allura trailed off, staring at the three exhausted beings before her. “I had no idea. I truly knew nothing of how badly the castle was faring.”

 _“How?”_ Keith asked them. “You guys are _always_ working on something, how has it gotten so bad that we could literally die by technical failure?”

Coran had finished… whatever he’d been doing, and settled back to begin linking the piece to a series of matching ones stacked to one side. “This castle is very old, Number Four. Built by my grandfather, you know. And it waited for ten thousand years with nobody to care for it. The Castle of Lions is meant to be kept up by dozens and dozens of mechanics and engineers and technicians. It’s a castle space ship, for Altea’s sake!” 

It could almost have been funny, but then Coran’s voice took on a more sober tone. “But they’re all gone now. Everyone is gone, and the castle is beginning to come apart in its age and disuse. And now overuse, almost – after so long doing nothing and waiting on Arus, all this travel and wormhole jumps and combat aren’t helping matters.

“Even in its prime, so many people were always needed to keep it up and running, just performing basic maintenance. I am trying my best, but this ship is old and needs more care now. I’m just one mechanic, no matter how good.”

“Hunk is hardware and I’m software, which is generally pretty good,” Pidge added, “but we’re also just one of each. And we’re both just Human. We’ve never seen Altean tech or anything like it, so it’s been a pretty steep learning curve.”

“That’s putting it lightly,” Hunk snorted with very little humor. “Also, I can’t read Altean. I have to get one of them to translate anything I have to read, unless it’s compatible with our translation programs – which, I might add, are pretty clunky and rough and definitely not great for advanced technical translations.”

Pidge sighed. “We don’t have time to improve them. And sure, I can read Altean – at the level of a little kid. Not great for technical work, either, although my vocabulary is definitely not that of a child. Mostly tech words, but still not enough.”

“So, yeah,” Hunk said, finally dropping what he was holding and leaning back with a sigh. “The castle is basically falling apart.”

“And we’re just patching the holes as they appear,” Pidge said with a bitter tone. “Fingers in the levee, and I don’t know how much longer it’s all gonna hold.”

There was silence. Shiro was honestly stunned at these revelations. He’d known things were pretty rough, but he had had no idea that the castle was essentially falling down around their ears, held up only by the ceaseless efforts of the only three members of the team who even slightly knew what they were doing in the regards of engineering and technology. 

Allura was horrified. This was her castle, her heritage. The Castle of Lions was all she had left of her people’s world. She was supposed to be connected to it. How had she failed to notice – to notice any of this? This was her castle, this was her team. And somehow she had managed to miss everything. All that remained of her empire was crumbling around her ears, and all she could do was stand there, feeling like a failure once again. 

Keith watched quietly. He knew burnout, had seen it in himself and in others. Pidge and Hunk and Coran were well past that point. Pidge looked like she could break at a touch, shatter like misheated steel, worked to the point of cracking and crumbling. Hunk probably could fall asleep standing up at this point, only keeping himself awake through sheer force of will and the knowledge that if he didn’t fix this, all his friends could die. Coran looked like he might actually be on a different plane of existence, eyes not quite there wherever he looked. 

They couldn’t keep going like this, it wasn’t possible. 

Lance clearly had the same thought. “Okay, wow. So this is, like, pretty bad.” Understatement of the year, really. “And honestly, we’re sorry we didn’t notice sooner. That sounds really hard, trying to keep the whole castle running between just the three of you.” He gave them a bright smile. “So how about we make it seven? That should help, at least a little bit.”

Pidge blinked at him, half irritated and half tired. “We’re not stupid, Lance. We didn’t ask you guys for a reason. None of you know how to do… well… anything. You’d all just get in the way or distract us.”

Hunk winced a little at the words – Pidge’s social behavior skills dropped even further than usual when she was tired. “We appreciate it, really,” he said with a weak little smile. “But yeah – it’s just that you don’t know what you’re doing, and we’re already kinda overloaded and can’t really spend time teaching you stuff. Sorry.”

“No, no, no,” Lance was shaking his head, seeming totally unhurt by Pidge’s edged words. “I know we don’t know anything, and it would take way too long for us to learn with the short times you keep having before stuff breaks. 

“But I’ve helped you on projects before, Hunk. I know how to do that. So even if all I’m doing is handing you tools or turning to the right section in the instruction manual or blueprints or whatever, then maybe that’s at least something. And also you get the company of my magnificent presence,” said with a teasing grin, “and maybe hopefully not feeling quite as stressed or lonely.” – said with much more sincerity. 

Surprisingly, Keith piped up next. “I’ve helped Pidge before, too. I know how to be useful and stay out of the way.”

“Your funeral, man,” Lance shrugged. He knew how Pidge got when she was working and stressed. Better to stay arm’s reach away at least, and probably out of random-object-throwing-range for good measure. 

“I know in truth an embarrassingly small amount of how to maintain my own castle,” Allura admitted, “but I _can_ read Altean and give whatever advice may hopefully be of use.”

“I can’t read Altean or fix an engine, but I’d be happy to carry things or bring food or whatever is most helpful,” Shiro said simply. 

“As long as you aren’t the one making the food,” Hunk clarified. Shiro nodded. 

“Good, because that’s lethal,” Lance said in a stage whisper. He pretended to hide behind Hunk from Shiro’s mock glare. 

“Food from the fridge,” Shiro promised. “No Shiro cooking involved.”

“Thank god,” muttered Keith. 

Pidge snickered. “And you can be my stepladder,” she said in a somewhat brighter tone than before. Shiro rolled his eyes, but nodded without protest. 

The rest of the day was spent working non-stop, all of them. It started a little slow, as the people who knew what they were doing taught the others how to do some of the things and explained what they could do to help with the rest. 

Lance and Hunk were so used to working together that the Blue Paladin was able to effortlessly assist his lifelong friend with minimal corrections. After watching Hunk work for a while, he’d figured out the basics and was soon able to clean the pieces of the air filtration machine, only passing them to Hunk so that the engineer could reassemble them. Hunk put a few parts in backwards, so worn out that he wasn’t quite seeing straight, but between Coran and Lance they all got reset and installed correctly. 

Keith had volunteered himself into the lion’s den by offering to work with Pidge. She had a long reputation for being snappish and irritable when she was working, even at the best of times. When she was tired, or sleep deprived, or stuck on a problem, it only got worse. But he’d worked with her before, and they knew how to function together. 

He stayed quiet, knowing from the furrows in her face and the tension in her hands that she had more than a headache. She had abandoned a bent air vent cover and a massive heap of tangled cables and cords, focusing instead on a scattered mess of code that sprawled across her computer screen. 

Waiting for her to settle down and be ready to open up and tell him what she needed, he quietly worked on straightening out the air vent cover, pressing and pulling it against the floor to fix it without making noise. Once it was mostly back to normal, he set to work on the horrendous rat king of cables. By the time he’d finished that, Pidge had relaxed a bit and was talking vaguely at him as she worked through her code, using him as a rubber duck to find the (many, but nobody was going to comment on that) errors in the piece. 

Coran commandeered Shiro and Allura for a number of hours, citing a few engine room issues that required heavy lifting and would be completed much faster with them. Occasionally a racket sounded through the halls, metal crashing and scraping, and a couple of times Coran’s staticky voice came over the castle comms requesting that Lance or Keith bring them a specific tool or piece or assist as another pair of hands. But within a few hours, the kelyan turbine cycler had been repaired and all six grafler wheels had been replaced – no easy feat, as each one weighed as much as a young Balmeran. 

They shifted a bit in the afternoon. Shiro spent more than half an varga with Pidge on his shoulders, obediently going from ceiling vent to ceiling vent along the hallways so she could replace some level meters that had been fritzing out. Keith was tasked with tightening all the bolts on the air filtration unit once Hunk had reassembled it in its basic form, as Allura sat beside Hunk and carefully translated the battered ancient copy of an instruction manual for one of the health scanners from the med bay, so that Hunk could figure out why it kept saying that everyone had the slipperies and nothing else. Lance and Coran rearranged an entire large storeroom for better ease of use. 

The work took up the entire day. If it had been anything else, Allura and Shiro would almost definitely have protested the time – they had training and raiding and diplomacy and research to do. But the castle was, quite literally, coming down around their ears. Of course, if that wasn’t motivation enough, half of the team was working themselves to the bone and their exhaustion was showing almost painfully. 

They would get more things done faster if everyone worked together, and the others would be less strained under the load. Also, all of this could easily be excused as official Voltron Team Building™. In addition to literally keeping them from dying. Who knew the castle’s life support systems had been in such bad shape?!

At some point late in the day, Lance and Keith seemed to wander off. Allura stormed out in search of them, ready to snap and lecture them about ditching work, but she ended up finding them in the last place she would have expected – the kitchen. 

“Hunk’s just been so tired,” Lance explained with a small guilty smile. “They’ve been doing so much without us ever helping or even noticing. So I thought I could cook for once, even though I can’t do much. I dunno why Keith is here, though.”

“Same reason as you,” Keith grumbled, although there was no heat to his tone. “The more food, the better. And I don’t trust you not to ruin it and leave us all with no dinner.”

Lance sputtered indignantly, and Allura rolled her eyes and left, the sounds of Voltron’s Right Side arguing over what exactly to make and who was going to be in charge fading behind her. They would figure it out. Taking care of their friends was much more important than fighting with each other, to both of them. 

After such a long day and so much work, the entire team was absolutely ravenous. Keith and Lance’s dinner was simple, nothing fancy, but they had been sure to make more than enough, and nobody went hungry. 

Coran fell asleep sitting up, and Allura had to grab the mechanic around the shoulders to keep him from toppling moustache-first in to his plate. With a shrug to the others, she woke him gently and led him off to bed, one of her uncle’s arms slung around her shoulders as Coran weaved and stumbled as if he had drunk too much nunvil. They disappeared around the corner, and three of the Humans (the more awake and functional set) turned their attention to the other two. 

Hunk was eating like a robot and was quite possibly not fully conscious. Pidge had a datapad set on the table beside her plate, presumably brought with the intention of continuing to work on the latest set of code. But Lance was sitting right next to her, and he could clearly see that she had only typed the letter _q_ for the last five lines that were displayed on the screen. He leaned over and very gently removed the pad, pressing the buttons to save the work before powering the screen off. Pidge didn’t seem to notice. She kept tapping at the table top, staring blankly somewhere between her cup and one of the serving bowls. 

Shiro looked over the two of them with a mix of fondness and exasperation. Nobody on this team seemed to know how to properly care for themselves (Shiro included). “Okay,” he sighed, “time for bed.”

Shiro got Hunk up and moving again, although he was supporting a majority of the Yellow Paladin’s weight. After some poking and prodding and tapping and tugging didn’t work, failing to do more than make Pidge wriggle disconsolately but absolutely not get to her feet, Keith just gave up. He put the datapad in his jacket pocket and, with some help from Lance, got the smallest Paladin up on his back. 

The two pairs departed to get the Left Side into bed, and Lance started on cleaning the kitchen. He knew Hunk’s systems best: how to clean and put things away in a manner than would least aggravate the team’s chef once he had a good rest and returned to the kitchen. 

Hunk was technically awake, although Shiro really wondered how much of the evening he would remember tomorrow. He got the other to sit down and pulled off his shoes, then helped him remove his vest and headband. The vest was hung up on a hook on the wall, the headband carefully folded and laid on top of the bedside table. 

“Okay, Hunk. Bedtime.”

The Yellow Paladin nodded vaguely. “Yes. The pongles will need to be cleaned again.”

Shiro blinked. Then he sighed and shook his head. Who knew what those were – it was entirely possible that Hunk’s exhausted brain had just made itself up more work because it had forgotten how to actually properly rest. “Of course, I’ll be sure to do that. You get some sleep, okay?”

Hunk hummed and nodded, and the moment Shiro eased him down onto his bed, he was out instantly. 

Keith had to navigate the minefield of Pidge’s room, delicately weaving around heaps of metal and wire and nearly snaring himself in some stray loops of what looked like computer cords made of purple… something. The piles were all probably equally random junk and half-thought-out ideas, and extremely important projects that were vital for the work of Voltron or the maintenance and survival of the castleship. That was just how Pidge worked. 

It turned out that Pidge clung like a koala even in her sleep. Keith was finally able to wrestle himself free from her octopus grasp and drop his Arm mate onto her bed. She bounced a little but didn’t wake. Keith got her shoes off and manhandled her out of her sweater, then did a thorough check of her bed. 

Two wrenches, a hex key, six cable cords, a handful of soldering metal drip scraps, a left hand leather glove, and five gadgets of unknown purpose later, the bed was finally acceptable for a Human to sleep in. Keith tucked his basically-sister in and made sure her glasses and a bottle of water were on the bedside table within easy reach. Then he left, closing the door on the quiet hum and gently flickering lights of projects. They could all wait until tomorrow. 

By the time Keith and Shiro returned to the kitchen, Allura was already back, wiping down the table and counters while Lance put away dishes. They joined in – Keith put the rest of the leftover food in containers to store in the space fridge, and Shiro finished up the last of the dishes. Between the four of them, the kitchen was spotless in no time. 

It had been a long day, and although they were all much less worn-out than the others who had been working so hard for so long, everyone was still pretty worn out. They separated for the night after a few quiet words, and not even Keith tried to stay up or go to the training deck. 

They weren’t going to let this happen again. None of them were specialized in any of this work – engineering or mechanics or electronic skills – but today had shown that that wasn’t a requirement. They could all help and contribute in other ways, and it really did make a difference. 

The Castle of Lions was an ancient work of technology and design. But it was also very, very old. Three couldn’t keep it up and running, no matter how hard they might try to push themselves. Seven, though – maybe seven could do it. At least, they could spread the work out a little more evenly, make things just a bit easier, so that hopefully two-fifths of the most powerful weapon in the universe didn’t pass out the minute they got in their Lions for a mission. 

They were a team. That went beyond just fighting, beyond forming Voltron. The castle was home to all of them now. Keeping it whole was important to everyone – and so was keeping each other together. 

No alarms went off that night. Nothing broke or cracked or seized or malfunctioned. The Castle of Lions hummed, still and quiet. It had seen so much, been through so much. But it wasn’t done yet. It still had people making sure of that. 

The castle slept quietly, and so did the people within. 

**Author's Note:**

> for all of us going through finals. we can do it. we got this.


End file.
